A few blocks from where I now live, on a late summer afternoon, I stopped in my tracks and stared at the sidewalk for some time. I was an undergraduate art student, probably 19 years old, and particularly vexed by the opaque and impenetrable rationale of the art school curriculum I was enduring. Somehow, in my furious walk from campus toward my apartment, for the first time I articulated a question that would become a central concern of my career: how do we learn anything?

A founding member of the OCCUPY movement, Suzahn is a prolific writer and identifies herself as Iranian-American and social agitator. In her moving, critically astute essay in response to the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman trial and verdict, she argues that “passion and fury,” alongside issues of race privilege, must be acknowledged and challenged.

Between our challenging spaces of academic “doing” over the summer months, there is also the need for periods of renewal, that allow us to experience the season’s measured plodding and time to contemplate how our studies, practices and social commitments might be deepened and refueled.

Kyle Bella (MFAW ’14) had an essay called "Queering racialized bodies," which explores the relationship between the poetry of Akilah Oliver, Ronaldo Wilson, and the intersections of queer identity and race published online at the Jacket2.